Improving nutrition through enhanced food environments

This policy brief (PDF) from GLOPAN calls for a transformation of the food environment that promotes greater diversity, availability and safety of nutritious foods. The brief considers current evidence on what works, and provides recommendations for action that affect supply dynamics of the food system. To allow food environments to be more supportive of high-quality diets, the private sector, civil society and government must work together on the following key priority areas, according to the authors: 1) Implement economic measures to reduce the consumption of unhealthy foods through taxes, and to increase the consumption of healthy foods through subsidies; 2) Encouraging the marketing and promotion of high quality diets whilst restricting advertising and promotion of unhealthy foods; 3) Reformulating, labeling and processing foods in ways that increase their nutritional value and safety; 4) Influencing food supply chains to pay more attention to nutritious crops such as fruits and vegetables, pulses, seeds and nuts; 5) Providing high-quality foods in schools and workplace schemes; and 6) Collecting better data on the quality of food environments.

In a previous policy brief GLOPAN discussed the importance of food safety and healthy diets and the need for an integrated approach to achieve safe food environments. For more information, please click here.

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